Max Perkins: The Legendary Scribner’s Editor
Max first met Fitzgerald in the army…
After high school Max, like generations of Perkins’ before him, went to Harvard, and his best friend there — who arrived a year after Max — was Van Wyck Brooks, who was to become America’s greatest literary historian, with a string of hugely popular, and readable books, such as ‘The World of Washington Irving’, ‘New England Indian Summer’, and, ‘The Times of Melville and Whitman’, books that changed how America looked at its own literature forever — in fact made that literature known to the world. The friendship between these two young men — who both came from the same town — was such that each inspired in the other a love of great writing, a love that was to be a source, not only of an income for both, but a means by which America discovered its own literary past, and its continuing literary power in the 20th century.
Max graduated from Harvard in June 1907 with an Honourable Mention for his work in Economics — a skill he never used when it came to giving much needed advances to authors — and was the only one of his year who did not celebrate his graduation with a world tour.
Instead, Max got himself a job as an ‘emergency’ journalist at the New York Times, and would invariably sit through the night waiting for suicides, or fires, and then write-up the bare bones of the story…
